The Right Track

Peter Cohen is 84 years old, lives in the sticks—a couple of miles outside Ellsworth, Maine—and likes to write letters. Don’t get me wrong: This self-described ancien is no Luddite. He’s a friend of email and progressive politics, and his green Prius sports an "Octogenarians for Obama" sticker. But the métier in which I’ve found him to be at his best (discounting architecture, where he’s designed a handful of smart, inexpensive, and structurally innovative houses over the last half century) involves letterhead, a return-address stamp, and that increasingly rare commodity, a typewriter ribbon.